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Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Understanding the Psychology of Heretics

I have been wondering why otherwise
thoughtful, talented and highly educated people adopt beliefs which are
difficult to defend.

This triggered by interest in a book by
Will Storr called Heretics – Adventures
with the Enemies of Science (London: Picador, 2013). The talented
journalist and author looks at believers in homeopathy, deniers of climate
change, those who believe hearing voices is a natural phenomenon and can be
treated by listening to the voices and talking back rather than psychiatric
treatments and many others. Why this book is interesting is because it seeks to
understand the psychological process by which someone develops and clings to a
view despite the fact that the evidence and science is against them.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning
economist, has also been exploring this theme in his New York Times blog site
and in some of his columns. He wonders why, in the face of irrefutable evidence
that they are wrong, those who support austerity in Europe continue to do so.
He also wonders why economists who are convinced that quantitative easing as
practiced by the US Federal Reserve will “obviously” lead to inflation when in
fact there is no evidence supporting this view.

Storr suggests and discusses these
conclusions:

We each develop, for those issues in which
we have an interest, a mental model of reality and truth – our map of salience.
This map is based on a variety of things – education, experience, observation,
the views of individuals who are significant to us, opposition to the views of
those we dislike and so on.

As we develop a map of salience, we seek
out (consciously or unconsciously) evidence which reinforces our map and
exclude or dispute that which does not. That is, we seek out selective evidence
in support of our map of salience. This process in psychology is known as
confirmation bias.

The longer we build our map of salience,
the more it becomes our “virtual reality” – the way we see this issue or range
of issues. Those who believe in homeopathy cannot imagine their world view to
be wrong – “homeopathy can cure cancer!”
(it cant and in several countries it is illegal to make this claim as a
practitioner of homeopathy).

We don’t stop just at selective evidence
gathering. We also create evidence by telling ourselves or sharing stories we understand
to be true, even thought they are not. For example, the stories told by those
who have been abducted by aliens or have seen UFO’s. These stories are
powerfully held, told and shared and those who tell them are unshakable in
their belief that they are true. This we can refer to as “confabulation” - defined as “to
fill in gaps in one's memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts”.

But we are
not finished. Individuals then begin to practice what we psychologists call the
“sense stopping rule”.We ignore
everything that runs counter to our map of salience and our confabulated
stories (confirmation bias) and we scrutinize evidence from our opponents more
rigorously than we scrutinize our own claims, data and stories – that is, we
are simply unwilling to accept a different map of salience from our own.

Storr’s book is written as a narrative of his
encounter with mavericks, heretics and hucksters. Its not an easy book to read,
but it is insightful. He suggests that “the world as we know it began in the 18th
century” with the development of an understanding of the scientific method and
process and the growth of the Enlightenment. Science rescued man from the
tyranny of beliefs alone and enabled mankind to test their understanding of the
world in systematic, thorough and very focused ways. Through science, mankind
has been able to develop a set of maps of salience which are routed in evidence
which is independent of belief systems, confirmation bias , the sense stopping
rule and confabulation. At least we think it is.

When scientists begin to show signs of
confabulation, confirmation bias and the sense stopping rule – what do we now
do? This is Paul Krugman’s point. When this occurs, our trust in the particular
scientist (in this case an economist) and more generally in science begins to
be eroded.

One of my own problems with some climate
scientists is their growing use of confabulation, their clear bias on the basis
of “consensus” and the evidence of sense stopping. Not all of the climate
scientists can be seen to practice these things, but some significant players
can. Just as Paul Krugman wonders what the “science” of economics will become
when we have these behaviours occurring, so I wonder what will become of
science itself.

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Something About Me...

I am still working after leaving the world of the University and the Corporate work - consulting, publishing, writing. Owner of futureTHINK Press and author of 40+ books and operating a modest but very successful consulting practice focused on change and innovation.